Gallow: The Last Bastion

Book 0: GALLOW

by Nathan Hawke

Genres: Fantasy

Synopsis

The last battle for the fate of your country is coming. My kin are out for blood and revenge. Another empire sees a chance to come in and pick up the pieces of our war. Most of your warriors are stuck hiding in the swamps, always aware that they do not have enough numbers to win a straight fight. And from over the seas, my people bring their most deadly weapons, the Fateguard. Living suits of armour, imbued with mystical and deadly power. The end times have come for your land. I have fought alongside you, I have bled for you, I have made myself a traitor to all I believe in for you. And yet you still do not trust me. But you have no option. This will be our last battle, and there is only one place that it can be fought. We must defend our stronghold, no matter how many lives it may cost, no matter how hard it is. For if we do not, there will be no mercy and no relief from the terrors to come. Good thing I'm on your side.

Release date: September 12, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 305

Sample

‘So where’s the Foxbeard then?’

Outside Witches’ Reach, Sarvic stared at the pyre for a good long time after Valaric had finished his tale. Valaric shook his head. The Marroc from the fort didn’t know either. They were exhausted, bleak-faced and grim even in their triumph. There were a dozen left and the first messages to reach the Crackmarsh had spoken of five or six times that number. Proud men, all of them, or they would be once it sunk in what they’d done. Names to be remembered.

‘Varyxhun probably,’ said a short needle-faced Marroc who stood in their midst, and it was only when she spoke that Sarvic realised she was a woman. ‘He’ll have gone to Varyxhun. And I’ll be following him. The fortress is yours, Valaric the Wolf. Be sure you have a good look at the Aulian door in your cellar. Could be there aren’t any forkbeards about know the secret of where it goes, but most likely there are. Still – could be a way out for a man clever enough to use it.’

Everything was black outside the circle of light from the pyre. Valaric stared at the flames a long time, Sarvic beside him. ‘Strangest thing,’ Valaric whispered, eyes fixed on the corpse of the iron devil still wreathed in fire. ‘Couldn’t have been that many forkbeards who saw him fall, but the ones who did, they just stopped. It was like they’d seen the sun go out and it went through them like fire through a hay barn. I saw forkbeards truly afraid tonight, Sarvic, though I dare say they’ll get over it.’

They talked some more then about how mightily upset the forkbeards waiting by the Aulian Bridge were going to be to find that Valaric had slipped around behind them. They’d know by morning and they were only a few miles down the Varyxhun Road. Valaric reckoned that gave the Crackmarsh men until maybe a couple of hours after sunrise. A busy night for most of them then.

When they were done with their own wounded and finishing off any forkbeards too hurt to get away, they collected their dead and dragged them to be buried in the snow of the deep woods below the ridge where the Lhosir wouldn’t find them. After that they returned to the dead forkbeards, cutting the heads from the bodies. Valaric sent Angry Jonnic and a few others off to the Varyxhun Road with them, a trail of grisly little presents for the lot by the bridge to find when they came.

Sarvic had gone long before dawn but it was easy enough to imagine how that went. Brought a smile to his face every time, but by then he was slipping away to Varyxhun, up the valley with the needle-faced Marroc woman Achista and half a hundred others. Achista was off to rescue some Aulian wizard from the hangman, so she said, but Sarvic reckoned they might as well rescue a few Marroc while they were at it, and the two Jonnics figured that if they were going to be doing that, well then they might as well be ‘rescuing’ the whole of Varyxhun castle, and it was only afterwards that Sarvic realised this had been Valaric’s plan all along – to keep the forkbeard army out at Witches’ Reach while half his Crackmarsh men quietly crept off and did just that.

Gallow caught up with them that first day, set on the same thing as Achista. She asked him something about his family and his face went blank. The look Sarvic saw on him was a horror, like he really didn’t give a shit about anything any more. Like he just wanted to die with as many forkbeard corpses around him as he could possibly manage. It made him shiver, that look.

1

THE HANGED

There were riots in Varyxhun. Oribas couldn’t see what was going on but he could hear the screams and he could smell the smoke. No one told him what had happened, but on the day they decided to hang him and hauled him up to the castle yard he could hear and smell the turmoil. He could see it written on the Lhosir around the castle, on their faces and in the way they held themselves. He looked up at the gallows. They were going to hang him but he wasn’t going to be the only one. There were Marroc too. Pressed together with the other prisoners, he heard what had filled the streets of Varyxhun with revolt: the forkbeards were beaten. The iron devil was dead and Witches’ Reach still held.

Witches’ Reach still held.

He knew then that Achista was still alive and so he’d hang with a smile on his face.

There was an angry crowd somewhere outside the castle. Oribas could hear them shouting, calling out the names of the Marroc who were to die beside him. The snow was thick on the stones and the walls wherever it hadn’t been trampled into ice. A heavy fall had come in the night but now the sky was clear, the sun cold and bright, the frozen air as sharp as broken glass. There were a few Lhosir in the castle yard, come up from Varyxhun to watch, but not many. The last time he’d been here Varyxhun had been thick with Lhosir fighting men, each sporting the forked braided beard from which they got their name. Today the castle felt empty. Maybe the cold was keeping them away or maybe they’d gone to Witches’ Reach and now half of them were dead. The thought brought a flash of glee, quickly turning to shame. The death of a child, the death of a woman, the death of a man, he’d been taught there was never a place for joy in any of these things.

Then again. . . In the deserts of old Aulia people had robbed him, tricked him, lied to him, but no one had ever tried to kill him. Since he’d crossed the mountains with Gallow, it never seemed to stop.

An old Lhosir marched him up the steps onto the scaffold. At least the castle walls and the mountainside into which it was built kept them sheltered from the wind that scoured the valley; even so his hands were already numb in the cold. From the scaffold he could see a few Marroc among the Lhosir in the yard. Not many, but he could see the gates now too, the last of the six gates that rose in a single solid line up the mountain slope and barred the switchback road from Varyxhun to the castle. A line of mailed Lhosir soldiers with spears and shields stood across the entrance to the yard, barring the way to a crowd of hostile Marroc. Behind them lay the Dragon’s Maw, a gaping hole in the mountainside barred so tight with thick rusting iron that even a child couldn’t slip through. The dragon of Varyxhun lived in that cave, the castle’s guardian, waiting to devour any army that breached the last gate. The dragon was only a story but the crowd was real enough. The air was taut with their anger.

He looked at the Marroc men beside him. He had no idea who they were or what they’d done but he’d heard their wails and their screams for mercy in the darkness over the last few days and it seemed to Oribas that they were mostly ordinary men from Varyxhun. He heard his own name called from the crowd now and then, or more often ‘The Aulian’. He wasn’t sure how the Marroc even knew who he was, never mind what he’d done, but they did. It was a terrible thing, shameful, not something to shout about, but the Marroc shouted anyway.

The Lhosir hangman positioned Oribas on the scaffold, hands tied behind his back, facing away from the crowd with the rope right in front of his eyes. The iron devil is dead. He had to wonder about that, had to wonder how anyone had managed to kill the ironskin and who else knew how a creature like that could be laid to rest; and then wonder who had made it and what for, and why the iron devils of the Lhosir seemed so akin to whatever had once been entombed beneath Witches’ Reach; but he couldn’t find any answers and there was a limit to how much wondering even Oribas could manage, staring at his own noose.

The hangman turned him round to face the crowd as the last of the Marroc were poked and prodded to the scaffold. The forkbeards inside the castle were mostly old or crippled; the ones who were fit to fight had gone with Cithjan to Witches’ Reach. Now Cithjan was dead and half his army with him, but the other half was still out there, and while it was, the peace in Varyxhun remained fragile as a winter morning.

He hadn’t taken everyone. The Lhosir who held back the Marroc at the gates weren’t old or wounded. They were arrogant, these forkbeards, but not stupid.

A bull-like voice called out his name and began to proclaim his crimes. A few of them were true, the worst ones, although the Lhosir seemed to have added a few more for good measure. Oribas couldn’t imagine why. Burning fifty men alive was enough, wasn’t it? Certainly enough to hang a man but he’d have done it again in a flash if it was the only way to keep his Achista safe. At the edge of the crowd a Lhosir soldier with furs wrapped across his face against the cold was heading for the gatehouse dragging a Marroc woman in his wake, pulled along by a rope tied around her hands. A weight of sadness pinched Oribas’s lips. Keep Achista safe? She was still in Witches’ Reach and he was certain she wouldn’t leave. Sooner or later the Lhosir would get in and then they’d kill her. The ironskin had promised them all clean deaths, but now the devil was gone. And Oribas was here and about to hang, and he’d promised her he wouldn’t die first, and now there was nothing he could do. Nothing.

The reading of his crimes finished with the promise that Oribas would die here and now in front of these witnesses, and with a reminder that the Lhosir god – the Maker-Devourer – didn’t give two hoots what a man did with his life or how terrible his deeds might have been as long as he was honest. Oribas didn’t have too much of a problem with that. Here and now he envied the Lhosir for the simplicity of their belief. His own gods were more fickle.

Hands pulled Oribas towards the noose. They were surprisingly gentle. The Lhosir with the Marroc woman had dragged her to the gates and now he was arguing with the guards holding back the crowd. It was an odd thing to be watching when he was about to die, but it was strange. The Lhosir was mad. If the guards let him through, the Marroc outside would surely rip him to pieces!

There was something about the Lhosir though, something familiar. There was something about the Marroc woman too, but then the world went dark as the hangman slipped a hood over his head. Oribas yipped and shouted for it to come off, that he wanted to see – wouldn’t any man want to see for every last second he lived? But the hood stayed. He felt the Lhosir step away to reach for the noose, and then a great roar went up from the Marroc outside the gate. A murmur rumbled around the scaffold and then sharp cries of ‘To arms.’ Hands grabbed him, not so gentle this time, holding him, pulling the rope over his head. Oribas let himself fall limp, slumping in the hangman’s grasp before the noose could go round his neck. The Lhosir swore. For a moment he hauled Oribas right off his feet, then he grunted and let go, and Oribas fell hard to the wooden scaffold. He lay there, winded for a moment. The sounds around him now were of a battle.

A hand grabbed him by the foot and pulled him across the wood, then jerked. Something heavy – a body by the feel of it – fell across his back. Oribas pulled himself free and wriggled until he was on his knees, head so low that it almost touched his feet. He shook himself as hard as he could until the hood fell off and the first thing he saw was a dead Lhosir sprawled across the scaffold with two arrows sticking out of him. There was mayhem at the gates. The Lhosir with his Marroc woman was gone. The Marroc had surged forward and the . . .

Gallow?

He stared. In the middle of the forkbeards at the gate, breaking their wall of shields from behind, was Gallow. And the Marroc crowd were pushing forward, and the ones at the front suddenly had swords and spears and shields, passed up from the men behind, and . . .

The Lhosir with the Marroc woman – that had been Gallow. Oribas scanned the gates, looking for the woman and not finding her; then he saw a figure running up to the battlements where a single Lhosir stood watch. She’d thrown off her cloak and was carrying a bow. Achista! She was too far away for Oribas to make out her face but he knew her from the way she ran and how she nocked an arrow to her bow and drew back the string and hesitated a tiny moment before she shot. He knew her from the way she moved as surely as if she was standing right in front of him.

The Marroc on the scaffold had fled, taking their chances with the forkbeards below. Bodies lay around it, more Marroc than Lhosir. The forkbeards from the yard were mostly at the gates now. They might have been old or crippled but they were still Lhosir, and there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t armed and ready to fight. But they weren’t enough. From his perch Oribas watched their shield wall buckle and break and the Marroc force their way through. This was no mob – these were soldiers pouring into the yard, followed by the ordinary men and women of Varyxhun. People like the Marroc who’d been waiting to die with Oribas.

A Lhosir climbed the steps to the scaffold with a bloody sword in his hand. He snarled at Oribas and lifted it high. Oribas squealed and dropped to his haunches, ready to hurl himself into the snow below, but an arrow caught the man in the chest before he could move. The forkbeard sank to his knees, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Achista. Other Marroc were on the battlements now, some of them shooting at the forkbeards; still others hammered on doors with their axes, forcing their way into the gatehouse and the towers that overlooked the road below the castle. Oribas looked for Gallow again but the Foxbeard was lost in the seething melee. There must have been a hundred Marroc in the yard now and the Lhosir were falling fast. A last handful ran back to the inner gates, to the windows and halls and buttresses and towers and balconies built into the mountainside that passed for the castle’s keep, but the Marroc were hard on their heels.

The yard quietened as most of the fighting moved inside to the old Aulian halls and galleries. Some Marroc rushed in, hungry for blood and plunder, others remained outside, surrounding the Lhosir who hadn’t yet been killed, finishing them off and looting the corpses. Marroc soldiers moved through the castle towers, dragging out any Lhosir they found inside, dead or alive. It probably hadn’t taken ten minutes from start to finish and the castle of Varyxhun had fallen. Varyxhun, which had once held at bay ten thousand forkbeards led by the Screambreaker himself, lost to a rabble of angry Marroc.

‘Oribas!’ Achista had her bow across her back and a knife in one hand. She ran straight at him and almost knocked him flat as she crushed him in her arms. Then she was behind him, cutting at the ropes around his wrists. ‘Stupid Aulian! Do you understand what you did to me when I heard you were taken? Do you?’

He tried to laugh. ‘It was quite deliberate. You should have seen the precision with which I threw my head against the edge of a Lhosir’s shield. It was exquisite.’ He tapped the lump on his head and the scar, still raw. ‘I saw Gallow. Where’s Addic? Did your brother escape too?’

‘He did and he’s here. Inside now, I expect.’

Oribas stretched his arms and rubbed his wrists. He looked at the noose behind him. ‘It would have been worth it,’ he said, almost in awe of his own words.

‘What would?’

‘To have died for you.’

Achista took a step away and slapped him. ‘Don’t ever say anything so stupid again!’ And then before Oribas could think of what to say next, a gang of Marroc hauled a snarling Lhosir up onto the scaffold, all of them kicking and punching him. Down in the yard other Marroc turned to watch, shouting and cheering.

‘Hang him! Hang him!’

More Marroc were trickling through the gates, the hungry-looking ones, the scared, the weak and the slow. The mob was after any Lhosir, alive or dead, and the Marroc soldiers who’d led the assault were letting it happen, turning away and heading inside the castle. The men on the scaffold hauled the Lhosir to his feet and slipped the noose around his neck. Oribas barged into them. ‘What did he do?’ They pushed him away. Even Achista had a hand on his arm, pulling him back. ‘But what did he do?’

The Marroc who’d put the noose over the Lhosir’s head shoved Oribas hard, knocking him down. ‘He’s a forkbeard!’

‘But you can’t . . .’

The words died in his throat. Behind the scaffold someone pulled a rope. A trapdoor opened, the Lhosir dropped, the rope snapped taut around his neck, and that was that. Oribas thought he even heard the bones snap. The Marroc on the scaffold raised a fist and whooped and the crowd cheered. ‘One less forkbeard! Got any more? Yes? Which one next?’

The soldiers on the walls watched and joined in with the cheers. Those Lhosir still alive were beaten down, a few simply murdered, others dragged toward the scaffold. Oribas pulled himself angrily to his feet. ‘This isn’t justice and this isn’t right!’ He made for the Marroc hangman again but this time Achista blocked him.

‘This is war, Oribas.’

‘No, this is murder.’ Though was it any worse than fifty men burned alive under the ground? Hard to say, and maybe it was the guilt that drove him now. ‘You’re better than this!’

There was pain in her eyes, and Oribas realised with a sickening feeling that it wasn’t guilt or shame, but sadness that he didn’t understand why this killing had to be done. He faltered, and then another Marroc grabbed hold of him and was shoving him out of the way. ‘They were going to kill you, darkskin.’

‘For what I did, Marroc, not for what I am! It may seem small to you but on that difference the Aulian Empire was forged!’

‘And now it’s gone.’ The rest of the Marroc ignored him.

‘At least the forkbeards had a reason.’ Although they hadn’t had any real reason when they’d set out to kill him for the first time, when they’d carted him off to the Devil’s Caves with a gang of ragged Marroc simply for knowing the name of Gallow Foxbeard. And, really, what was he doing here, defending the men who’d been about to kill him?

One by one the Lhosir were pulled and pushed and dragged and shoved to the scaffold. They were hauled up the steps, manhandled to their feet and nooses were shoved around their necks, and they were hanged. Five at a time because that was how many gallows the Lhosir had built, with the mob baying for the blood of every single one of them. Oribas turned away.

2

SARVIC

Before the fighting kicked off, Sarvic was with the mob, right at the front of it. Valaric was either on his way from Witches’ Reach by now or else he was still there, taunting the forkbeard army that had meant to stop him and his Crackmarsh men from crossing the Aulian Bridge. Without Valaric, that left Sarvic and Fat Jonnic in charge. Jonnic was somewhere in the middle of the mob doing what he did best – shouting at people what to do. Sarvic was at the front, and that was just fine. He’d come a long way since he’d turned and run from the Vathen at Lostring Hill and been saved by a forkbeard. The same forkbeard he could see now, arguing with one of the soldiers at the gate.

The Marroc around him all wore thick heavy furs. This being the Varyxhun valley in winter, the forkbeards didn’t think anything of it, but the nice thing about furs was what you could hide underneath. Mail, for example. An axe. A sword. Further back, other Marroc carried spears and helms and shields, things even a bear pelt couldn’t hide. When Gallow appeared behind the forkbeards barring the gate, Sarvic quietly passed the word back. Fat Jonnic’s shields crept forward through the mob.

Gallow shoved the forkbeard in charge of the gate into the spearmen facing the Marroc. One of the forkbeards in the wall of shields staggered and took a step forward. His spear dipped and that was all Sarvic needed. He lunged, grabbed the shaft just behind the point and pulled hard, pushing the tip down toward the road as he did. The forkbeard stumbled another step forward. The soldiers either side snapped back from the glances they’d been throwing behind them but by then it was too late. Sarvic had always been quick as an eel, and he was between their spears before they could run him through. He pressed up to the forkbeard who’d staggered out of the wall, getting in nice and close. He raised a long knife high where all the other Marroc could see, then he rammed it into the man’s neck and pulled at him, yanking him out of the shield line while his blood spurted everywhere. Spears were fine weapons for keeping an angry crowd at bay but now the forkbeards had an armed man inside their points and it left them with an interesting choice: hold on to their spears and keep the mob back or drop them and take out an axe. So now was the time. Either the rest of the Marroc rushed the forkbeard line or Sarvic had about two breaths left in him before someone smashed his skull.

The Marroc surged forward. They didn’t hesitate, and right there and then Sarvic knew they were going to win. Behind the forkbeards, Gallow had thrown back his hood and drawn out the red sword Solace and was shouting and roaring about who he was and what blade he carried and daring anyone to face him and all sorts of other nonsense. For a moment the forkbeards looked uncertain. It was enough. The crowd fell on them like a spring flood from a broken dam.

Sarvic barged on through, past the silence of the Dragon’s Maw and into the yard. A few more forkbeards stood about, some of them still looking up at the scaffold, others frowning at the gate, the quickest-witted of them already starting to move. He let out a murderous roar. The more forkbeards he killed before they realised they were armed and should be doing something more useful than gawping, the easier it would be. He headed for the scaffold, intent on cutting down every forkbeard in his way. Up there was a man supposed to be an Aulian wizard, half the reason they were there, but at a quick glance Sarvic couldn’t tell the prisoners apart. If he was honest, he wasn’t all that bothered.

A forkbeard came at him swinging a hatchet. Sarvic raised the shield he didn’t have, swore and threw himself sideways instead, rolling across the cobbled yard and crashing into the legs of another who bellowed a curse and lifted something big and heavy-looking. Sarvic knifed him in the foot and scrambled away from the scream that followed. He wasn’t going to reach the scaffold after all, but back by the gates the wall of shields had stayed broken, and more Marroc soldiers were getting into the yard and throwing off their furs to show the mail they wore beneath. The men who’d been hiding deeper in the crowd rushed forward with shields and spears and more swords and axes. A good few carried bows. Sarvic snatched a shield off a Marroc he half-recognised from the Crackmarsh and shouted something he hoped sounded inspiring. Not that anyone needed much encouragement by the looks of things.

Beside him the needle-faced Marroc woman from Witches’ Reach shot an arrow into a forkbeard stupid enough to make himself an easy target by standing up on the scaffold. Achista the Huntress, that’s what the Marroc of Witches’ Reach called her, and in reply she called them her Hundred Heroes, the dozen of them she had left. They deserved it after what they’d done. As far as Sarvic saw it, every one of them should be a lord or prince just as soon as the last forkbeard sailed back across the sea.

A hand on his hood yanked him back. He staggered and almost fell as an axe sliced the air past his eyes. ‘Is it bedtime, Sarvic?’ Angry Jonnic shoved him aside and drove the forkbeard back, battering him with his shield.

‘Up yours!’ Sarvic lunged low and fast with his knife, neatly hamstringing the man with the axe. He left Angry to finish him off and pushed on towards the castle keep. The forkbeards were scattered now. One climbed onto the scaffold. A last prisoner was still up there, shaking off his hood. The prisoner’s skin was dark and Sarvic had heard enough about the Aulian wizard to pause for a moment to see what would happen. But the forkbeard didn’t turn to ice or explode or burst into flames, he just took an arrow for his pains. Apart from his dark skin the wizard looked oddly ordinary to Sarvic – scared out of his wits and close to shitting himself, much as anyone else ought to be.

The forkbeards from the gate were retreating to the steps of the Aulian Hall of Thrones. Marroc swarmed around them, swamping them. The stream of men passing into the yard turned to a flood. Sarvic snatched up an abandoned spear and stormed to where a few more forkbeards were making a stand on the steps. Cithjan the Bloody had once held his council here but he was dead now. The iron devil had burned him and spoken him out and then Gallow had killed the devil. Which was all a snarling shame: they could have done with hanging Bloody Cithjan high over the gates for every Marroc in Varyxhun to see, him and his ironskin too.

The forkbeards on the steps faltered and broke before Sarvic could get to them. He saw Gallow’s massive frame thunder inside with a dozen Marroc in his wake and followed as fast as he could. He’d been starting to get the hang of killing forkbeards that night outside the Reach when they’d turned and fled, and he might have cut down one or two as they ran, but forkbeards never ran and it had taken him by surprise when they did. He’d watched for a moment before the savage inside had called for blood and by then they were away. Now his luck was out again. He forced his way into the Hall of Thrones. Marroc were on the floor, the kin-traitors who’d worked and lived in the castle and served the forkbeards, cringing and cowering and begging for mercy now as they were beaten half to death. Sarvic spat on them as he passed. The hangings would start as fast as they could. Every Marroc who’d made this place their home would swing and they’d deserve it too. Valaric might have something to say about that, but the Wolf wasn’t here, and by the time he was it would be done and too late to argue.

Sarvic skidded to a stop. The forkbeards were mostly gone, but not all of them. Two stood in front of Bloody Cithjan’s throne. Old men whose strength had long faded from their arms, but they were armed and armoured and already three Marroc lay dead in front of them, pricked by forkbeard steel. Sarvic grinned and started towards them. Strange lot, forkbeards. Wicked bastards, evil and vicious and mean in a fight, but they had their superstitions. Like back at Witches’ Reach when the Crackmarsh men fell on their camp in the middle of the night and Gallow killed the iron devil. Some of the forkbeards had turned and melted away like any sensible man should, but the ones up inside the fortress hadn’t. They’d retreated in silence behind their wall of shields. Even when Sarvic had run up close and taunted them and thrown spears and stones, they hadn’t answered. Right in the middle of the battle and they’d left. Just lost all interest in it, as though the fall of the ironskin mattered more than fighting a rabble of angry Marroc, and Sarvic hadn’t thought there was a forkbeard alive who’d give up a good fight for anything less than a severed limb. After the first few jeers, Sarvic and the other Marroc had mostly stood and watched them go, uneasy at their own victory.

Now two of them were ready to die to defend a dead man’s chair. Sarvic was happy to oblige them, but another stood in his way. Huge in all his furs, even from behind there was only one person it could be: Gallow the Foxbeard, who’d faced down the iron devil of Varyxhun. Sarvic remembered clear as the sun: the Foxbeard standing beside the pyre and on it the ironskin, and then Mournful telling him how it was, how Gallow and the iron devil had fought as the Crackmarsh men swept down the mountainside. How the iron devil’s red blade Solace had shattered Gallow’s sword and how the Foxbeard had killed him anyway, ramming the splintered remains of his blade through the devil’s mask.

The rest of the Marroc scattered, looking for plunder or other forkbeards to kill or whatever drove them now. Sarvic looked the two old men up and down. Warriors once. Didn’t take mu. . .